Last week, we also got a visitor in our Freshman Seminar class on Friday October 29th 2010 at 9:30 AM. This workshop fulfills our career exploration requirement and was presented during class time. Our visitor was May and she was a representative of the STARR Career Development Center. She came in to talk to us about our resumes and our potential interviews that we will have to pass in order to secure a well-paid job. She made it clear that these two things are just as important as having the actual grades or the extra curricular activities. She emphasized over and over again how important presentation is when it comes to the resume and interview, more specially the interview. She said that it is very likely that you will be able to win over the employer with your personal character traits if they are the right ones even if you might have lower grades or not much experience. She said that the relationship you make with your future employer in that 30 to 45 minute window is one that can make all the difference. I have heard quite a few different presentations similar to this one in the past and I have even created a resume for myself before although I never really used it or found any good use for it but I did find that this presentation had some good aspects in it. Her presentation style was not the best and did not make me instantly want to listen to her but for the most part she did say a lot of things that I found to be both true and interesting and somewhat revealing. One of the most interesting things that I learned is that at the STARR Career Development Center we could actually set up mock interviews for practice. I found this to be so interesting because I never knew this service was offered and I haven’t heard of this service in other schools and I might actually take advantage of this opportunity in order that when I actually go to a real interview I will not be as nervous and will have a very good idea of the questions that I will be asked and the tone and pace at which the interview will proceed. I also found it very interesting that there are people in Baruch who are willing to help you in that way for that specific purpose. Although they will help you with only the basics and no one will literally go into full depth of your personal situation I still think that these opportunities will be very helpful because they will serve as good practice for the first couple of interviews and those interviews will serve as good practice for the ones to come and the ones that you will be taking much more seriously. Overall, I’m not sure that May’s personal way of presenting all this information was necessarily correct but nonetheless she mostly got the point across and was able to inform us of this part of the center so we at least know that this type of help exists and could potentially be pretty useful.